


starlight, starlight (isn't science a kind of magic?)

by sabraneadaz



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Bittersweet, Emotional Hurt, First Meetings, Gallifrey, Gen, Multi, Other, POV The Doctor (Doctor Who), Post-Episode: s12e01-02 Spyfall, Post-Episode: s12e02 Spyfall Part 2, Thoschei, not really very angsty? mostly sweet and dreamy, the doctor Reminisces, timelords, what is gender
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-21
Updated: 2020-01-21
Packaged: 2021-02-27 04:48:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22351336
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sabraneadaz/pseuds/sabraneadaz
Summary: Just as surely as she was attuned to the beats of her two hearts and the oxidation in her respiratory system, just as surely as she could feel her regeneration energy always thrumming under the shield of her skin, she could feel Gallifrey fall.
Relationships: The Doctor & The Master (Doctor Who), The Doctor/The Master (Doctor Who), Thirteenth Doctor/The Master (Dhawan)
Comments: 14
Kudos: 74





	starlight, starlight (isn't science a kind of magic?)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SeekingSelkies](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SeekingSelkies/gifts).



> Title from Can't Fight the Moonlight by LeAnn Rimes - I strongly recommend listening to this for Thoschei feels.  
> Hope you enjoy <3

Some little part of the Doctor’s mind noted the scrunch of her socks under her toes. They were clenched up inside her boots, inching over the lip of the TARDIS threshold – an automatic reaction despite her knowing that there was no way she could fall beyond its safe confines. Those toes hanging out over the edge of space, though - well she supposed with the nature of her regeneration, having exploded the TARDIS’s boundaries (once again), and then being suspended in the cold, still expanse of space – she supposed that it was only her toes’ natural instincts to tense against the soles of her boots.

The orange glow, the sheer fiery beast of a burning Gallifrey – it licked at her boots from beneath her, lit up her face in a deathly glow and glinted off her hair. She could see that too, could feel the light and the heat glinting off the golden strands of her hair where it fell despondently, devastatingly, over her eyes, just as surely as she could feel the web of the time vortex, the turn of the Earth under her feet, the TARDIS hurtling through time and space. Just as surely as she was attuned to the beats of her two hearts and the oxidisation in her respiratory system, just as surely as she could feel her regeneration energy always thrumming under the shield of her skin, she could feel Gallifrey fall.

That spire…those thrones and halls and vaulted ceilings of the Academy. The massive orange suns encircling the horizon and casting their glow over the red grasses sweeping over the hills. Setting the gold fixtures and domes alight…

But now it truly burned.

Her fingers clenched on the wood of the doorframe, holding her in place as she half fell out of the TARDIS in a bid to get closer, as if magnetised by the sight of her planet imploding. She squeezed her eyes tight and opened them again, and this time they hosted a sheen of moisture which blurred her vision, a useless protection for eyes prevented from burning by the cold expanse of space stretching between her and her home.

The red grasses, each strand long and bold, flattening under her bare feet. Her toes as a young child spreading in the soil, scrunching it under them as she did now with her socks in her boots. Those gorgeous violet and vermillion shells encasing the delicate beetles that hung from those strands like hot dewdrops. They’d spent years, probably, cumulatively, amongst those grasses. That is if they had measured Time in such a linear way on Gallifrey. Koschei’s father’s land stretched for acres, and when they’d met as youngsters it had been underneath them, in the complex network of tunnels and caves that made up the hydration system of his land. She’d been exploring – following a procession of birds that as a young lad she hadn’t recognised, as they burrowed down into the soil and traversed the tunnels. He’d been down there already, collecting samples from the birds’ underground nest with a pocket scanner - ancient technology in comparison to what they used later in the Academy. She still remembered their first conversation with crystal clarity despite their history. He’d accused her of ruining his experiment by interfering with the burrowing patterns of the birds, and she was too busy pickpocketing his scanner and flicking through the multidimensional graphs it contained about mineral levels in the nest to listen. And it was there in those burnt orange tunnels surrounded by burrowing birds that their friendship first began.

From then on, Time, in the way it could be measured for them, was spent amongst those acres of his father’s land on the doorstep of the Academy. In younger years as their forms varied they would play and replay the same historical scenes from fixed points in Time – the Judoon invasion of Abraxus V; the Great Living Chime’s opera debut in the Kasterborous constellation; the trial of Pascarborun III – swapping from character to character to match their changing appearances and preferences. There were those days spent sneaking into the Academy itself when Koschei’s form was stable enough to pass as a true regeneration. That time she had stolen two vortex manipulators from a storage cupboard of sorts (faulty, not that she’d realised so when she stuffed them inside her robes) and fed them through a pipeline out of the Sun-Room (as the name suggests, a room dedicated to the study of the twin suns over Gallifrey) and into Theta’s waiting hands where he lodged himself between the walls of two buildings. Then they made their escape by sliding down the curved rooftops, and each having painted their bodies in friction-forming drag-paint they were able to slow themselves enough to avoid any injuries. They escaped that time with no evidence left behind except Koschei’s stolen robes flung over a convenient spire. Of course they’d been apprehended soon afterwards – something about the Sun Room’s data analytics tipped the professors off to their escape route through a light pipeline – but the intervening time was glorious. They’d constructed tools to help repair the devices (after Theta had given Koschei the silent treatment for a while) and spread them out in the grassy fields, deconstructing and reconstructing the vortex manipulators until they could jump back minutes at a time and a distance three times that of Koschei’s father’s land. The havoc they wreaked was fantastic to see – all nuisance stuff, never anything properly dangerous – but of course the Academy tutors didn’t see it that way, and never forgot their dangerous meddling even during their studies there.

Then, the Doctor thought, there were those quieter moments on Gallifrey; those afternoons spent watching the suns expand through the sky, watching their perimeters burn bolder orange and closer to the horizon. Watching those brilliant beetles raising their shell-wings in sync to flash that orange glow between them, directed from one shell to another like a beautiful house of mirrors until the rays concentrated in a precise arrangement of circles which burned into the nearest tree. Then Theta would rest his – her – their head in Koschei’s lap, and together they’d watched the beetles take flight, barrelling straight towards the tree until the mass of fluttering wings and bodies stoppered it up.

When they were youngsters, the two of them would take turns drawing equations on the other’s back. The Doctor’s fingernail scratched lightly against the doorframe of the TARDIS as she recalled tracing those intricate circles on Koschei’s shoulders, up his neck and onto the back of his head to make him laugh. Gallifreyan was a beautiful language and they would spend hours drawing it upon the other as if magic-making (and after all, isn’t science a kind of magic?). Soon, guessing the equations turned into theorising, and they often built intricate webs of mathematics and force and energy purely in their minds and inscribed upon their bodies.

And then when they were older again, and collapsing in the fields after their daring escape from the Academy – how they giggled and shushed one another, trembling with the excitement of the chase and crouching low in the grass in case they were followed. They’d cradled the technology in palms pressed together between them, and Koschei had laid her forehead against Theta’s as they shared victorious breath. That day, after the argument about the faulty tech, Koschei had scratched the drag-paint from the backs of Theta’s calves, and Theta had done the same for her. Nearby, two burrowing birds had groomed each other.

And then, older still, lying in the grass on top of their Academy robes. Holographic systems floating in the air around them. Theta’s head resting upon Koschei’s chest. Legs outstretched and tangled as they bickered over the finer points of temporal paradoxes. The setting orange suns burnishing their dark skin bronze. At that time Koschei had a fascination with Theta’s hair, pulling locks of it out straight and then watching it spring back into tightly formed curls against their scalp. The Doctor had found it so irritating all those lifetimes ago, but now the memory sprung tears to her eyes.

Those Academy days; those days before the time vortex; the days of equations upon backs and heists in the Academy; the days of burning red suns and burrowing birds in underground nests. Now, all up in flames.

And the person who had done it, unrecognisable.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading <3  
> I took major liberties with this story because I didn't look up any canon about Gallifrey and made up basically everything :) (including how I decided young timelords are like HDM daemons and change their form all the time)
> 
> You can find me on tumblr at [folieassdeux](https://folieassdeux.tumblr.com)
> 
> I love you and I also love comments ;)


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